<h1>The trouble with being retired is you never get a day off. </h1>

This blog writing takes time - about 2 hours for one entry. I am afraid I might run out of topics. If I do, you will just have to put up with reruns. Today's topic touches on PD medicines and treatment, along with some useless information. I am going to try to make this a short one so, here goes.

One thing that really bothers me; in spite of the obvious evidence to the contrary, I can no longer type efficiently. My fingers act without my help and against my will. They hit one key twice or two keys at once. They accidentally cause portions of a completed entry to be erased, etc, etc, etc. It is totally frustrating, but I can live with it.

I am hung up on other things I let get to me too. For example, I now have to use a spoon to eat peas or rice. That can be embarrassing. And one more thing, I have to use a cane for support when getting off the bed or off the toilet.

However, I consider myself lucky because I have the tremor dominant form of PD. My limbs are not stiff and I can use the treadmill and stationary at high speeds for a guy my age. All that is copacetic; but I still have PD; although, on the PD scale, I give myself an 8 (1 being totally dependent).

So, I am doing relatively well, but, what about the ones who are lower on the scale. How can they, and we, all be helped -ie- cured. Well, be patient, science has been looking for cures for several decades and some of their work has actually been beneficial. No cures, but good drugs. We don't know what causes PD, but we all can describe the problem in our brains by rote. I know I am preaching to the choir because every PWP, upon diagnosis, reaches for the keyboard and googles "parkinson's." The net is full of entries for PD and from them we learn that it is caused by a group of cells in the substantia nigra, responsible for the production of dopamine. Dopamine is the neurotransmitter for these cells to signal other nerve cells and it is diminishing quickly. Its major functions are involved with:

• movement
• memory
• attention
• sleep
• mood
• learning

These, and other, less bothersome functions, are impacted negatively. I won't go into detail, but you can see you are probably living with one or more problems caused by the loss of dopamine. For the past 50, or so, years, scientists have been searching for that elusive cure and on the way, they have developed drugs that control the symptoms. These drugs replace the lost dopamine. The "gold star" of these drugs is levadopa, first available in the 1960's. It has now been combined with another drug, carbidopa which reduces the side effects of the use of L-dopa and makes it more efficient. Carbidopa/levadopa first became available in 1975 and it retains its gold star status.

Dopamine agonists, drugs that mimic the processes in the brain in the production of dopamine, have been around since the 1970's and are often prescribed to be taken with L-dopa (I don't know why and I only have sketchy ideas of how Agonists or L-dopa work)..... "Damn it Jim, I'm a blogger, not a doctor"..... I only know a combination of L-dopa and the agonist, mirapex, have kept my symptoms away for 7 years.

There is another treatment that sounds scary but has been met with success by those PwP that have severe symptoms that cannot be controlled by drugs. It is deep brain stimulation. Again, I know nothing about it. I only know MJF refused it because it involved the brain. That sort of put me off DBS. I only have one brain and its complexity and the possibility of damaging that complexity, gives me pause.

This brings me to today's rant - stem cells.

Although the underlying cause of Parkinson's disease is unknown. Researchers are already using stem cells to grow dopamine-producing neutrons to study parkinson's in the study of the disease, especially in those cases where there is a known genetic cause for the condition. Because a single, well-defined type of cell is affected, it may also be possible to treat Parkinson’s by replacing the lost nerve cells with healthy new ones.This type of treatment could be used to: replace neurons damaged by spinal cord injury, stroke, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease or other neurological problems; produce insulin that could treat people with diabetes and heart muscle cells that could repair damage after a heart attack.*

Sounds good, right? But as usual there are dissenters. The religious right in the USA take the position that killing embryos to harvest their stem cells is just another form of abortion. Any government funding must be stopped. I don't know how they justify their opposition to the destruction of an embryo to rid the world of a disease for which there are no known cures. I guess it must be the same arguments they spout off about abortions, but we won't get into that.

The scientists argue that embryonic stem cells are not alive so why not use them to help we PwP? In the case of excess embryos (created for infertile couples) they are marked for destruction anyway, so why not kill them for the betterment of mankind?

As for me, I side with the scientists. I don't accept that an embryo is a living soul and don't get me going on abortion. I have no energy to try to fight a just fight on behalf of the abortionists. Just get me a cure before I am too old to enjoy it. In the words of Stephen Hawking:

Stem cell research is the key to developing cures for degenerative conditions like Parkinson's and motor neuron disease from which I and many others suffer. The fact that the cells may come from embryos is not an objection, because the embryos are going to die anyway.

This still took quite awhile and I am left dissatisfied. I need chocolate!

*http://www.eurostemcell.org/parkinsons.